Struggling a Bit Here

JUST LOOK AT ALL THAT CREEPING CHARLIE.
I thought it passe to be concerned about the looks of my lawn. I let two years pass, at first carelessly, and then with mild concern, as I watched the charlie spread through my lawn, nose its way into my raised beds, and appear anew in places unsuitable to its growth preferences. Was I wrong to have done nothing? We know a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest - and charlie will come upon you like a thief, and weeds like an armed man.
Well, here I am, in the weeds. Bellflower too! I could almost wish for a morning glory problem instead of this. I am weeding full weekends when I could be expanding my backyard plot, or even going for a walk and not gardening. The sun has appeared dark to my eyes and I face despair - and so soon after the Lord's Pascha! Weeds are like the sin and temptation that threatens our strength of soul, so we must pluck them out in early spring - only for them to return redoubled in a short time and obliterate our plans to put down a few Kuri Squash and a row of Amish Paste Romas back there.
Isn't that just the way it is; still no wedding garment after all these (10!) years.

From the Final Harvest, Long Ago

The September Garden

As I rightly feared, this year the garden suffered from a string of distractions and a lag of enthusiasm. I threw myself into a design project that overtook what was left of my life (after work, kids, church, being a wife) and used up a great deal of creative energy. We split a CSA share from Turnip Rock Farm, which is always a dream, but it gave me little reason to rely on my own growing space to feed our family throughout the summer. My neighbor and I started a corn patch in back which was poorly planned and poorly tended, and ultimately yielded next to nothing after squirrels and rot took their respective toll. I threw a bunch of plants down where bare earth appeared, without much thought to how they would detract from the overall garden vision - or how they would contribute to the creeping charlie nightmare. Finally, a I think a suburban laziness overtook me. Using the rain barrel seemed an exceedingly tedious task. And not once did I resist the urge to ooze in front of my computer, watching bad TV and scrolling through Facebook (yes, I am on Facebook now; yes, it's everything I thought it would be, and I want to die).

if you look very closely you may see a revolting supper club of beetles, wasps, and flies.

let's hope it grows back 

Needless to say, my first year vigor gave way to a sophomore slump, though a few good deeds were still accomplished. For example, I grew my first decent-sized beets (almost by mistake) in my pine mulch blueberry bed. I had my first successful brussels sprouts, and I had green beans to feed a neighborhood. I put them into excellent use as pickles. I also managed to expand my native perennial border (still without being ticketed by the city!) and experiment with perennials in the kitchen garden.

a few thoughts:

Watch out for that anise hyssop. It spreads like a pernicious weed.

Start your broccoli out in march if possible, and eat real heads, not stringy flowers,

Grow more cabbage and eat, eat, eat sauerkraut.

Finally, don't get too cocky about those tomatoes you saved from seed. They won't be quite what you hoped for.

The Midnight Garden

DEVASTATION

Zack and I were so proud of our corn patch. It grew up beautifully despite the odds, set back by a late start, a weedy early period, and a mere 5.5 hours of daily sun. We saw sweet ears of corn, perfectly formed; blackened silks to alert us to their ripened perfection. A priest visited, commenting on the privilege it would be to put water to the flame, pick ears of corn, and drop it in the pot to cook having lost not a single sugar to starch in the interim.
The next morning, our visions of greatness, hopes, dreams - they were dashed, chewed up, digested, gnawed away. The vile vermin of Heights alleyways! As if on cue, they were collectively possessed, compelled, all at once, to nibble and shred every last ear of sweet corn on every last stalk, leaving us absolutely nothing to enjoy but the wry commentary of Neighbors Randy and Mark.

Zack has taken up his pellet gun against the neighborhood squirrel population. It's genocide before us.

Potato Day

Potato Day in the Hansen garden is fun! Kids and Moms alike love the thrill of digging up tubers. This year our 5-6 potato plants yielded two good potato dinners. Hardly worth it.

NOTHING GOES BETTER WITH POTATOES THAN DELICIOUS GARDEN ONIONS

FENCE DAY

Ben did this today:

The fence. No, those are not our Priuses. Priuii?

tangled native mess

The native garden, finally looking like a garden and not a weed patch. Still pretty weedy though.

I've been growing these since late February.

It's Infectious, Until it Gets Too Hard

Neighbor Zack is a pretty great neighbor. He introduced himself right away to us as we moved in, offers all kinds of neighbor help, lets my kids tear through his yard... and even forgives me for the creeping charlie which has dominated my lawn and is poised to challenge his. He has not only tolerated my garden zeal but taken a bit of his own interest as well - he and his kids grow a thing or two in their dappled shade raised beds.

This year he approached me with an offer I couldn't refuse: to let him dig up my backest yard into a cornfield for us to share. Did I refuse? No, in fact I did not; and also did most of the work involved in cultivating, planting, and tending our little corn and pumpkin patch.

poof, now you see it. 

The new garden is doing quite well, despite endless heckling from Neighbor Randy and Neighbor Mark. We have tall stalks and tassles, which are surprisingly beautiful; and what's more, pumpkins on the way. 

ah yes, quite nice.

It pleases me to see less grass and I'm already plotting for the start of my restoration project next spring. Admittedly, though, for every square inch of sod I remove, I get six cubic inches of charlie. And what's more, pumpkin vines look like creeping charlie with elephantitis. It's a bit disturbing.

It's the end of July

Isn't summer nice

I don't know who put these in my garden

Brassica city starring Too Many Collards

Stuff just grows here

Views from mid-June

Timber

We slept on it for a number of months. A maple that seemed to have grown up by accident was casting a dense shade on the front yard garden, stunting our new raspberry patch, and threatening to join up with the lindens to create a canopy of cool darkness where we want to have light. Was it okay to cut down a tree? We had a good goal in mind - a place to grow food - but even cultivation is a human invention, with a long history of habitat destruction (depending on whom you ask). Maybe taking this tree down would be an act of hubris, human folk once again making the outrageous claim that "the buck stops here," whatever, that we are in charge and nature can suck it.
Maybe debating the ethics of cutting down a tree in the suburbs is pointless, since most trees have been placed there by a human. Almost every tree up here is somehow related to a human act or a human omission, excepting a few mighty old maples and cottonwoods that seem to have been in the so-called "Columbia Heights" since creation. We live in an artificial landscape, not even a shadow of its original form, so maybe eliminating a young maple is not much different from a preschooler knocking down a tower of ABC blocks.
In any case, we consulted a priest, a farmer, a poet, and our tender inner conscience, and knocked the tree down.

We replaced it with this little beauty, a true dwarf Liberty apple from RainTree Gardens in Washington. It came bareroot via UPS in a triangular cardboard box, and for the first month after planting looked pretty much like a stick in the ground. Here, finally, we have some tender first leaves.

Glamour Shots

Before I knew anything about gardening - much less ornamental and perennial gardening - a florist I knew arranged flowering forsythia as a table centerpiece at our wedding reception. I couldn't believe I was looking at what was essentially blooming sticks. In those days, my idea of home decor was random groupings of bare sticks throughout the house, so forsythia was an amazement to me. I decided then that I would one day own a home in order to have my very own forsythia planted near the front door.

Well my friends, I've done it. Today I am enjoying a first meager bloom of my wildest dreams.

The Archpriest Jonathan has assured me that the bloom will get better year by year, so I'm resisting the disappointment in this pathetic show.

ARISE O GOD

Tulip

Forsythia

Peony

Day Lily

Garlic

Rhubarb

I Have Two

I don't know if houseplants count as gardening, but these violets are really special. Besides, there's not much else to comment on in the dead of a Minnesota winter. The plant belonged to Grandma R., and I adopted it when Grandpa R died and she moved into her new home. I almost killed it once when I thought it would like to be transplanted, but it pulled through - much to my relief! Here it is now, blooming vibrant against a snowy picture window. Who knew we would get flowers in January?

little gardener, big carrot

Remember and Don't Forget

Remember to garden next year, don't forget that you love it and it's worth the annoyance of getting out your flats and cells in February.

I'm going to shift into winter mode now. Leaves are falling, snow will follow, and I won't have much to say on the garden for a while. I'll be over here, if you want to watch the circus I'm making of my life.

Guest Speaker Today

Back in April, she'd have killed for a tomato. Not the imported store tomatoes that were strip-mined in Texas, but fresh garden tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. That's how my mother felt, too, back then in my youth, so in May she set out thirty or forty tomato plants to satisfy our tomato lust and now, going into August, fresh tomatoes are no more rare or wonderful than rocks, each of us has eaten a bushel of them and there are plenty left where those came from.
One night, she and I snuck over to the Tollefsons' after their lights went out and left a half-bushel of tomatoes on their back step.

Garrison Keillor, from Lake Wobegon Days 

A Late Summer Overview

the September garden:

Thinking of year one in the garden, all I can say in summary is "surprise." I put a few sunflower seeds down, only to watch the young stalks be mowed down by rabbits, then miraculously shoot up again and bring hundreds of bees out of hiding. I put a few little herb transplants side by side, then struggled to find enough room for them as they outgrew my expectations. My kale grew short and bushy and my amaranth grew tall and spindly, completely messing up my attempts at ornamental-edible. 

Surprise, we accomplished more in a summer than I was going to allow myself to do, surprise, home ownership makes a fiend out of me, surprise, let's put rocks between the pavers and not creeping chamomile. Surprise, we have really great friends, though that should not have come as a surprise.

I treat gardening as an experiment. Part of me thinks that after a few good experimental years I would have a better grasp on this stuff: what works in Minnesota, how big things get, how to get carrots to germinate... but I still feel like I'm just fooling, just playing around, and I never know what to expect. Now I'm beginning to think that that's how gardening is supposed to be - that "experiment" is the wrong word because it connotes repeatable results, and no garden I know has grown the same way twice. Maybe "conversation" is a better description of what I'm doing out there - making little suggestions, getting some sassy vegetable retort, confessing "I love you anyway," and seeing the discussion from a different perspective - but that makes me sound a bit crazy, doesn't it.

the changing landscape

garden lowlights: stuff that doesn't deserve it's own post

Here are some minor notes from 2014:

free potatoes

I'm still making my mind up about potatoes. Feel free to disagree. To me, these heavy feeders are a big investment for what they return to you - they take up a lot of space for a one-time harvest (unless you feel around for new potatoes in mid-summer, which I never had much luck with), require trenching and mounding and mulching, and then sprout in your basement while you forget to eat them. 

This spring, I had some of those sprouted lovelies leftover from Holly's city farm, and after filling and planting my raised beds, I had a tarpful of leftover dirt as well. It seemed like it was worth the gamble, so I cut up a few and plunged them into my dirt-bag (I guess that can be a real thing). All in all, I got about 8 or 9 plants (here you see them half-harvested) and about 10 or 15 pounds of buttery heirloom potatoes to try to remember to eat.

I have to say, I am pretty excited about my modest potato gleanings, if only because they were so, so free. Also, children love harvesting potatoes, and that might be worth all the care in itself.

Michael's serviceberry, my weed garden

On the right, Michael's serviceberry. We planted it on my birthday, just above where we buried his placenta, long due to get out of our freezer and into the ground. It's gross, I'm sorry. The serviceberry is supposed to bloom white in the spring, bear nutty blueberry-type fruit in the summer, and show great colors in the fall. I put it here to be an anchor of the woodland part of my native restoration project in the backyard.

On a related note, the weed patch below the pine tree are some very lovely pink-to-purple woodland flowers that have survived years and years of mowing, Ben was experimenting with not mowing the back lot, and we discovered a diverse little habitat back there, growing and growing despite the prejudice and persecution of the American lawn. We got a citation from the city. 

You can imagine my inner turmoil as I hacked back the gangly flowers and grasses, watching tiny critters flee the destruction as their homes were reduced to "organic material." In defiance, I left an "underplanting" of the pinks and purples. We weren't fined; I think the city backed off when it saw my sassy attitude and fierce resolve.

compost cucurbits

after powdery mildew

Thanks to Farrah, Max, and Jessi for helping us establish our compost heap. Not only are we making bonus dirt, but we got bonus food out of those bins. Every year since I started composting with Holly and Jesse, there have been volunteers in the compost bins: cucurbits and nightshades mostly, which can handle the hot heat of decomposition. I remember vividly the compost squash of 2011 that took over half the yard, vining out from the sod heap and producing lush, dinosaur leaves from all the nitrogen of decomposing grass.

This year I got a butternut squash for free, and I let it grow, training it to a trellis as it spread. Esther and Michael loved it - it provided a wall of greenery for a sort of play fort between the compost bins, back stair, and trellis. 

Today I am watching 7 beautiful butternut squashes ripen on the vine - albeit a much less beautiful vine after I chopped off 3/4 of the powdery mildew. Look at the size on those!! One is a foot and a quarter long! Here's hoping the flesh is not tough and bitter!

You can't save the world

THE RAIN BARREL. This is a dream come true for me. Ben hauled out to Hudson to get this one for $10. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.